Electric Cars Are An Extraordinarily Bad Idea

President Obama has announced a goal of having one million electric cars on American roads by 2015. The administration has allocated $2.4 billion in "stimulus" money to subsidize production of them, along with the batteries and other components that they use.

Unfortunately, electric cars are about to do a barrier crash into economic reality, and all the airbags in the world won’t be able to save them. The taxpayers’ $2.4 billion is destined to join Obama’s $535 million investment in solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra at the bottom of the crony-capitalism "stimulus" rat hole.

The Nissan Leaf is the first mass-produced "battery electric vehicle" (BEV). It uses state-of-the-art lithium batteries. Despite this, the Leaf makes no sense at all. It costs more than twice as much ($35,430 vs. $17,250) as a comparable Nissan Versa, but it is much less capable. The Leaf accelerates more slowly than a Versa and has only about 25% of the range.

At $0.11/KWH for electricity and $4.00/gallon for gasoline, you would have to drive the Leaf 164,000 miles to recover its additional purchase cost. Counting interest, the miles to payback is 197,000 miles. Because it is almost impossible to drive a Leaf more than 60 miles a day, the payback with interest would take more than nine years.

However, cost is not the biggest problem with BEVs.

On Wednesday, Jan. 26 a major snowstorm hit Washington D.C. Ten-mile homeward commutes took four hours. If there had been a million electric cars on American roads at the time, every single one of them in the DC area would have ended up stranded on the side of the road, dead. And, before they ran out of power, their drivers would have been forced to turn off the heat and the headlights in a desperate effort to eek out a few more miles of range.

This illustrates the biggest drawback of BEVs, which is not range, but refueling time. A few minutes spent at a gas station will give a conventional car 300 to 400 miles of range. In contrast, it takes 20 hours to completely recharge a Nissan Leaf from 110V house current. An extra-cost 240V charger shortens this time to 8 hours. There are expensive 480V chargers that can cut this time to 4 hours, but Nissan cautions that using them very often will shorten the life of the car’s batteries.

No doubt some conventional cars ran out of gas while trapped in the massive traffic jams that occurred in and around the nation’s capital the night of January 26. However, a two-gallon can of gasoline can get a stalled conventional car moving again in a few minutes. In contrast, every dead BEV would have had to be loaded on flatbed tow truck and taken somewhere for many hours of recharging before it could be driven again.

Nissan claims that the range of a Leaf is about 100 miles. However, in their three-month extended road test, Car and Driver magazine obtained an average range from a full charge of 58 miles. Cold weather and fast driving can shorten this to as little as 30 miles.